


Paint by Number

by samidha



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-03
Updated: 2011-01-03
Packaged: 2018-12-01 14:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11488062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/pseuds/samidha
Summary: Four, three, two, one....





	Paint by Number

**Four**

There were ways they were the same, Dean was thinking, thinking of _anything_ but where they were going, who they were talking to when they got there. They were in the same photographs, few and far between. More photographs in the back of the car, now they were here. Pictures proof of a shared past, their number grown from four to, suddenly, twenty, overwhelming. Numbers too big for the scant Winchester life. 

They had sped away from Lawrence, Dean still swallowing back bile with the old house miles behind them, one _I‘m sorry_ her only words and not for him and not--

And Dean had thought it couldn’t get worse than that, that pain that tore his heart to pieces, so he was leaking out onto the road as they went, harder to leave than it had been to come because everything was so newly raw it dripped his blood all along the blacktop.

One apology, and Dean wasn’t--he wasn’t _jealous_ , he was just _bleeding_. There was a difference.

He had seen her. He had seen her. He couldn’t have-- hadn’t stopped it, and he had seen her.

That was all.

So he was bleeding, and he didn’t say the words back to her. What would they have meant, anyway, after everything?

He had thought that day in Lawrence the worst of it, the worst he might ever see.  
There he was, bleeding out all over the highway, pulse in his ears and heart in his throat, it was bad enough. It was enough for any son to bear.

**Three**

Anger fueled them, then, fueled the whole damn operation. Dad a quiet menace, barked orders that once surprised even him, chased by apologies, fewer and farther between as the man hardened. Dean watched and he learned not to wait, not anymore. Grew to accept the hardness, to love it. Water from a well fast becoming empty. But it was fine. Dean didn’t know the horror of war, wouldn’t ever know the horror of watching the flames, watching what they took away. Dean grew up and he learned not to want, learned not to need. Learned to be a soldier without the war to push him, learned to be thankful just for that and kept his momentum up because he was spared.

And Sam. All flash and growl, scowl and scoff. Sam’s anger was hard and fast and always just under the surface, pointed and focused and if you got on the wrong side of it it would leave you flat.

But Sam didn’t have the market cornered. Dad didn’t either.

It was only easier if neither of them knew they didn’t.

Nothing wrong with a quiet, slow boil. Only pointed inward anyway.

**Two**

Dean wasn’t there--he wasn’t _there_ , God dammit. Well, Sammy said he was, said there had been a fuckin’ _ouija_ board and a Reaper and Dean had hunted the fucker, _hunted it_ , but Dean didn’t remember, no flash of the righteous anger he was damn _entitled_ to feeling, because, fuck it _all_ , when he’d woken up Dad was _gone_ , gone even while tears spilled into his beard, signed away and _damned_.

And yeah, that slow boil? Dean was done with that shit right then and there.

He hammered out the very last dent weeks later, but the thought of what he’d done left him cringing for months.

**One**

Dean was no stranger to the smell of decay. Of death. Inertia, though, that was new. Poisonous. Killer. 

Because there was nowhere to go from here, not with everything fallen down around his ears. Twenty-three years and Dean was the one left, ashes and dust and death and nothing, in a place where no one would come looking, not a soul.

And he was tired. He was so tired. So many tears, so much futile rage, so much choking fear.

Because Dean was the slow boil. Enough to heat them all from inside of himself. The calming force. And now. And now. He was spent. Empty kettle on a dead hearth. Ash and dust and wind that scattered it all, so that he forgot even to breathe.

His hands seemed as cold as Sam was, somehow, so that when he reached out for (the body) Sam he could almost swear there was warmth under his touch. He had to-- had to--

He had to.

Stood in the devil’s den and the press of demon (dead) tongue reminded him of his own warmth, his own fighting chance.

It would have to be enough. It was all he had.


End file.
